A blog mostly about technical difficulties and how they were overcome

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The Great GoDaddy Fiasco of 2017

The Billing Fiasco

GoDaddy billed us on 8/22/17 for full price, $2,699.91, for 3 wildcard domains. I had spoken to a rep about this some weeks before and said we hadn’t made a decision, so didn’t want to renew yet. We had 2 months left on our certs…

The SSL Certificate Revocation Fiasco

I called in to cancel this charge. We planned to investigate, possibly change SSL cert structures due to a web domain expansion, and barter for better rates. The rep at the time said the NEW certs had to be revoked in order to cancel the charges at 10:33AM. GoDaddy’s system requires that you barter heavily for reasonable rates.

I specifically asked to ensure this would not affect our present certs which had two months left (expiry of 10/21/17). All seemed well, our refund was due. I should have checked more thoroughly.

The SSL Explosion Fiasco

At 2:11PM a customer reports a bad cert. This means customers who were new to our website from 10:33AM to 2:11PM were greeted with a security error. Since we recently moved to all HTTPS/SSL, our entire site(s) were down. Business halted. Everything was fucked. This lost us thousands of dollars, hurt our brand & image, and was an IT nightmare.

The GoDaddy Hostage Fiasco

In short, GoDaddy took a long time to tell us to fuck off, that this was our fault, and we had to order more services to fix it. That our old certs could not be restored. They held our services hostage, offering no resolution, and tried to milk us for more funds.

The – Character Fiasco

We now embarked on a quest to bring our websites up using a newer UCC/SAN SSL Certificate. In so doing, we found that several domains did not work. Turns out, GoDaddy represents the domains on their webpage and in their documentation with a dash character of UTF-8 code hex 0xE28091 (integer 14844049) rather than the FAR more common (and accurate) hex 0x2D or 45 integer you’d find on your keyboard. We hypothesize that some designer liked the thinner – afford by this crazy character set and that this is costing their support tens of thousands of dollars over the years.

The customer support rep was angry at us for this problem, though he stated that this happens with some regularity for YEARS. We try to explain the problem to him. His understanding and DGAF attitude seems this information and any potential technical resolution will stop with him.

The Solution Fiasco

We were finally able to get our sites up and clean up this mess around 6:15PM. We could have done this faster if we had stopped, gave up on GoDaddy and their support entirely, and just spooled this up on our own. It probably would have taken us less than 2 hours after failure had we caught the issue and assumed that GoDaddy was an absolute wasteland of competence and/or assistance at every level. This downtime cost us thousands of dollars and completely burned our relationship with GoDaddy.

The Resolution

We will be migrating our dozens of domains, SSL certs, and all products with GoDaddy. We have spent tens of thousands of dollars with them over many years. This isn’t the first time we’ve been treated like garbage within their structure but it is the last time. Fuck GoDaddy. Never even think about using them.